No Vacancy: Seven Frontier Hotels Where the Old Guests Never Left

Goldfield Hotel

Champagne is said to have run down the front steps when the Goldfield Hotel opened in 1908. The excess fit the town. Gold was found at Goldfield in 1902, and by 1906 about 20,000 people lived there, briefly making it the largest city in Nevada. The hotel went up on the southeast corner of Columbia Street and Crook Avenue (US 95) for somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000: four stories, a U-shaped plan so every room had an outside window, about 150 rooms, a mahogany lobby, an elevator and crystal chandeliers. George Wingfield, who had settled in the camp around 1904 and incorporated Goldfield Consolidated with Senator George Nixon in 1906, is the name tied to it.

The money did not last. The population was down to 4,838 by 1910, ore production had fallen to $5 million by 1912, and the largest mining company left in 1919. A fire in 1923, blamed on an exploding moonshine still, destroyed most of the town's wooden buildings. The hotel and the high school survived. By the end of World War II its last occupants were officers and their families from the Tonopah Army Air Field, and it has been unoccupied since. Several owners have had plans for it. A roughly $4 million Edwardian-style project collapsed in bankruptcy in the 1980s, Edgar "Red" Roberts bought the building at auction in 2003 for about $360,000, work resumed in 2017, and the property was listed for sale in 2022 at $4.9 million. Vandalism and unauthorized entry have been frequent. It is a contributing building in the Goldfield Historic District, which went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

On the map, the Goldfield Hotel is flagged for a trapped spirit named Elizabeth, aggressive entities, and activity in the rooms and the basement. Elizabeth is folklore. The story goes that she was a woman who claimed to have had a child by Wingfield, that he chained her to a radiator in room 109, and that the baby was thrown into a mine shaft. Nothing in the sources used here backs any of it, and the dates do not help: the telling puts her death in the 1930s, after Wingfield had sold the hotel, while the shafts under the building were dug in 1925 by a later owner, Newton Crumley. Wingfield died in Reno in 1959. A researcher at the Central Nevada Museum has noted inconsistencies in the ghost stories.

On television

Ghost Adventures first investigated the hotel in 2004, an investigation that became known for a brick that seemed to be thrown across a basement room. TAPS of Ghost Hunters followed in 2008, in the show's fourth season, in an episode called "Spirits of the Old West." The Ghost Adventures Travel Channel episode, "Goldfield," is Season 4, Episode 15, and aired in 2011. The crew came back in 2013, and in 2021 Discovery+ released a two-hour special, Ghost Adventures: "Goldfield Hotel," on October 1, with Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, Billy Tolley and Jay Wasley. Promotional material described it as a return to the town where the team's story began.

Jerome Grand Hotel

The Otis elevator installed in 1926 is described as Arizona's first self-service elevator. It serves all five levels, and it is still in use. The building was never meant to be a hotel. It went up as the United Verde Hospital, with plans dated February 1926, and opened in January 1927 for the copper town spread below it on Cleopatra Hill. The hospital was poured-in-place concrete, cut into a 50-degree slope against the bedrock of Mingus Mountain, and by 1930 it was being called the most modern and best equipped hospital in Arizona.

The United Verde Copper Company built it. William A. Clark had bought the United Verde mine in 1888, and his family held it until 1935, when Phelps Dodge took over and ran the hospital until it closed in 1950. The mine shut down in 1953. Jerome's census count was 4,932 in 1930 and 464 in 2020. The building sat unused for 44 years, until Larry Altherr of Phoenix bought it from Phelps Dodge, taking possession on May 29, 1994. The first rooms opened as the Jerome Grand Hotel in 1996. It sits within the Jerome Historic District, on the National Register since 1966.

The map entry for the Jerome Grand Hotel lists a nurse, a boy, a wheelchair that moves on its own, and residual activity from patient deaths and suicides, all of it told as stories rather than records. One account of the local stories puts a nurse with a clipboard in the halls, and the hotel's own history page says two psychics, more than a year apart, reported that the Head Nurse was upset about the removal of the dispensary desks. In 2003 the original desks were moved back to within a few feet of where they had stood. The one named death in circulation is Claude Harvey, an orderly said to have been crushed under the hospital elevator in 1935. According to that same account, no autopsy was done, the death was ruled an accident, and rumors that he was murdered followed. The boy has no name or date in anything the accounts offer.

On television

Ghost Adventures filmed "Jerome Grand Hotel" as Season 5, Episode 3, for the Travel Channel in February 2011. The episode guide describes the hotel as the most haunted building in a town nicknamed the "Ghost City," with residents reporting encounters with spirits, and says the team tries to calm what it calls angry ghosts.

Hotel San Carlos

The Hotel San Carlos opened in March 1928 at Central Avenue and Monroe Street, seven stories of reinforced concrete in a Renaissance Revival style, designed by George Whitecross Ritchie and financed by Dwight B. Heard and Charles Harris. The lot had a modest history for a downtown corner. Phoenix's first school, a small adobe building from the 1870s, stood here, and its brick successor, Central School, was condemned in 1916 and cleared before the hotel went up.

The hotel's own history calls it the first air-conditioned hotel in Phoenix, and Wikipedia repeats the claim. The hotel describes a pump and evaporator serving each guest room, and the "first" rests on its word rather than an independent record. The guest list has the same texture. The owning family told KJZZ in 2015 that Mae West came to town in 1929, the year the Orpheum opened, and that Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and, in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe were guests. Monroe's decade at least lines up with the record, since Bus Stop was shot partly in Phoenix in early 1956. The National Register of Historic Places lists the building as the San Carlos Hotel, added December 8, 1983.

The story behind the map entry starts on May 7, 1928, less than two months after the opening. Patrolmen on Monroe Street heard a scream and a thud at 2:45 a.m. and found Leone Jensen, 22, a guest from Los Angeles, who had jumped from the roof. The Arizona Republic ran the story the next day under the headline "Woman Takes Own Life By Seven-Story Leap From Hotel San Carlos," and the state filed a death certificate dated May 10. She left notes, one on the back of a hotel envelope asking that the coroner settle her bill and see that her clothes were packed. That much is on paper. Her reasons are not. The version told most often is a breakup with a bellboy. The 1928 press did report that a bellhop was questioned about bruises on her body, but the accounts that cite her notes and the coverage do not support a romance.

The map entry names an "Elevator Ghost" tied to a 1920s suicide, along with child apparitions, cold spots and poltergeist activity in rooms and hallways. The local reports collected by Salt River Stories have no elevator in them. They describe guests seeing a woman in white at the foot of their beds, a little girl crying, and children laughing and running through the hallways and basement. Salt River Stories notes that some have tried to link the children to the Native American grounds the hotel was built on. That is an interpretation, not a record.

On television

Ghost Adventures filmed the hotel for "Hotel San Carlos," episode six of season 26, which reached Discovery+ in July 2023. The episode summary has the crew looking past the hotel's glamorous front to a darkness said to drive people mad, and meeting a presence the show calls demonic and links to deaths on the property. The summary does not name Leone Jensen, so how much of the episode follows her story is not something the listings settle.

El Rancho Hotel

Across the porch roof of the El Rancho runs the slogan "Charm of Yesterday ... Convenience of Tomorrow," lit in neon at night above a stone-and-timber front that looks like a western set. R.E. "Griff" Griffith, a theater operator, came to Gallup in 1936 to open the Chief and Navaho theatres, and Joe Massaglia built the hotel for him on Route 66. It opened that same year. Clair Gurley, the first guest, was invited back after the 1988 reopening and charged the original $5 a night.

Gallup sat in the middle of the country that 1940s and 1950s westerns wanted, and the El Rancho gave casts and crews a base, with staff trained by the Fred Harvey Company, according to the Park Service. Wikipedia, citing the American Film Institute catalog, lists films shot around Gallup from 1941 to 1965, among them Streets of Laredo (1949), Ace in the Hole (1951), Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) and The Hallelujah Trail (1965). The Park Service names Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart as stars who stayed, and calls them a few of many. The lists do not say which guest worked on which film. Wikipedia and the Park Service also call Griffith the brother of the director D.W. Griffith. A 2024 history on the Never Quite Lost site calls that a myth and names him Rupert Earl Griffith, born in Texas in 1893, a film salesman turned theater owner, and the hotel's own history page mentions no famous brother. The family tie is best treated as unproven.

The Hollywood link lasted until the mid-1960s, when, as the Park Service puts it, the lure of the western hero was fading. Interstate 40 then drew the traffic off Route 66, and by the 1980s the hotel was bankrupt, its contents auctioned and demolition likely. Armand Ortega, a New Mexico trader, bought the property in 1986 for $500,000 and spent about as much again restoring it, according to a 1989 AP report. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on January 14, 1988, and reopened that May.

On the map the entry reports the spirits of film stars and locals, with EVPs, footsteps and objects that move. An Albuquerque Journal profile says that when it asked the hotel's longtime historian about the paranormal side, he changed the subject.

On television

Ghost Adventures filmed "El Rancho Hotel" for season 24, episode two, which aired in November 2020. The episode summary has Zak Bagans and the crew looking into a rise in activity that had led several employees to quit, and a suspicion that a demonic ritual performed on the property set it off. Nothing in the listings ties the episode to the film stars.

Castaneda Hotel

The Castañeda opened on January 1, 1899, a two-story brick U wrapped around a courtyard that faced the Santa Fe tracks, with a 500-foot arcade and a bell tower over the entrance. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway built it for $110,000, plus $30,000 for furnishings, and the Fred Harvey Company ran it. Frederick Roehrig of Pasadena designed it as the first Mission Revival building in New Mexico and the first Mission-style Harvey house. It replaced a frame boarding house called the Depot Hotel, where passengers ate during lunch stops in the 1890s.

Fred Harvey's trackside system ran on women hired as waitresses, the Harvey Girls, and the company employed an estimated 100,000 women over the years. In Las Vegas the Rawlins Building across Railroad Avenue served as their dormitory. Six months after the hotel opened, in June 1899, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, came to town for the first reunion of the Rough Riders, and a photograph in the Palace of the Governors archive shows him in front of the Castañeda. The Plaza Hotel's Wikipedia article claims that reunion too, so the sources do not agree on which hotel hosted it.

The railroad closed the hotel in June 1948, after it had been losing money through the 1940s. It then stayed mostly vacant for about 70 years, longer than it had been in service. Some rooms were used as apartments and the bar kept going, but most of the building sat empty and deteriorating, and it escaped demolition when the Alvarado in Albuquerque did not. Film crews used it in the meantime: it served as Soviet army headquarters in Red Dawn (1984), and it is where the leads meet in Speechless (1994). Allan Affeldt, who had restored La Posada in Winslow, Arizona, bought it in 2014, and it reopened in 2019.

On the map the entry still reads as an abandoned Harvey House, with shadow figures and residual hauntings reported. That matches the building as the Ghost Adventures crew found it in 2015, four years before the reopening. Those are investigators' reports, not documented history, and the historical sources used here record no named ghost for the building.

On television

"Haunted Harvey House" aired on the Travel Channel in 2015. TVmaze's episode summary says the crew became the first team to investigate the Castañeda, then gained access to a second hotel, the Plaza Hotel, where an aggressive spirit is said to be targeting women. That is why the same episode is listed on both Las Vegas entries.

Plaza Hotel

The Plaza Hotel went up in 1882 on the north side of the old town plaza, a three-story brick building with an Italianate facade and twin staircases rising from the lobby to the second floor. A group of businessmen led by Don Benigno Romero built it for $25,000 and advertised it as the finest hotel in the territory. People called it the Belle of the Southwest.

Las Vegas had been a Santa Fe Trail town since its founding in 1835, and the plaza was its commercial center. Then the railroad arrived on July 4, 1879, and put its station a mile east of the plaza, across the Gallinas River, which created a rival New Town beside the tracks. The railroad also brought gamblers and gunmen. Wikipedia's account of the town lists Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid and Hoodoo Brown among the notorious names, and the Plaza's own history includes Dick Liddil, a former outlaw, who leased the hotel's bar and billiard room in 1885. When the Santa Fe built the Castañeda in the late 1890s, the Plaza stopped being the leading hotel in town, and by then many of its guests were tuberculosis convalescents. The hotel's Wikipedia article says the first Rough Riders reunion was held there in 1899, though a photograph places Roosevelt in front of the Castañeda, so the venue is best treated as unsettled.

From 1913 to 1915 the silent film director Romaine Fielding leased the entire hotel and renamed it the Hotel Romaine, and traces of the name can still be seen on the brick. Cowboy films, including Tom Mix westerns, used the building, and scenes of No Country for Old Men (2007) were shot inside. The hotel was restored in 1982. Allan Affeldt, who bought the Castañeda in 2014, restored the Plaza as well.

The ghost story staff and guests tell centers on Byron T. Mills, a former owner who died in 1947. The lobby bar was named Byron T's for him by 2006. The stories put him in Room 310, which they say was his office, and describe cigar smoke, a weight sinking onto a bed and banging on the bar wall. These accounts come from staff, guests and local writers, mostly unnamed, and the sources conflict even on how long Mills owned the hotel. The map entry adds ghostly guests, footsteps and apparitions tied to the old-west past, all reported rather than documented.

On television

The Plaza Hotel does appear in the Ghost Adventures episode "Haunted Harvey House" (Travel Channel, 2015), the same one listed for the Castañeda. TVmaze's summary says that after investigating the Castañeda, the crew gained access to the Plaza Hotel, where an aggressive spirit is said to be targeting women. The summary does not name the spirit, so a link to the Mills story is not established.

St. James Hotel

The ceiling of the former bar at the St. James, now part of the dining room, still has bullet holes in its pressed tin, and the count depends on who is giving it: about twenty in one account, twenty-six in others. Wikipedia says Henri Lambert's sons found many more when they replaced the roof in 1901, and that a double layer of hardwood flooring upstairs had kept anyone sleeping there from being hit.

Lambert, remembered in the hotel's story as a personal chef to Abraham Lincoln (a claim the accounts repeat without a source), opened a saloon on the site in 1872. He had gone to Elizabethtown hoping for gold, found little and started a restaurant and saloon instead, until Lucien Maxwell, whose Maxwell Land Grant covered the country around Cimarron, encouraged him to move. It was Lambert's Inn at first and had grown into a two-story adobe hotel by 1880, later renamed the St. James. Cimarron sat on the Santa Fe Trail, and the hotel declined after the railroad bypassed the trail and local gold dwindled. It changed owners repeatedly between 1926 and 1985, when it was restored, and it closed in September 2024 and reopened under new owners that December.

The guest roster is the hotel's calling card: Wyatt and Morgan Earp and their wives on the way to Tombstone, Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Clay Allison, Black Jack Ketchum. Jesse James is said to have always taken Room 14, registering as R.H. Howard. Those are the hotel's own stories, repeated in local guides and news coverage. The violence has a thinner paper trail than the guest list. Wikipedia records that in 1876 an outlaw named Davy Crockett killed three Buffalo Soldiers in the barroom, and the hotel's tally of 26 killings is repeated in news coverage with no documented list behind it.

The map entry reports apparitions, cold spots and poltergeist activity. The best-known story is Room 18, kept locked: Thomas "T.J." Wright, a cowboy and miner from Elizabethtown, is said to have won the hotel in a poker game and been shot in the back before he could claim it, and the shooter was never identified. That is folklore, and the versions disagree on the details. Mary Lambert, Henri's wife, is the other fixture, tied to Room 17 and a smell of roses. Jesse James turns up in these accounts as a guest in Room 14, not as a ghost.

On television

Ghost Adventures filmed at the hotel for "St James Hotel" (Travel Channel, 2014). TVmaze's summary has Zak, Nick and Aaron at the hotel in Cimarron where many famous people of the Old West, including Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley, are said to have stayed.